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It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!

I am not happy about this. I copy and paste from other website too but I always give the links that I copy from. Or I mention the teacher's name such as Bonnie Blanchard or Janet Behning. If I adapted from a book, you will see at the bottom of my page, I mention adapted from Bastien's book or etc....

This guy is shamelessly copy from my website without giving me credit.....

I'm not a lawyer, so any advice that may be taken from my post is not fully valid and I should not be held responsible

Now,

Legally speaking I'm not sure there IS a case really. Your text is not a work of art exactly, it's just... a text (very nicely said, done and worded, but still...). This means that I don't think there is a copyright to be attached to your text in the FAQ. Moreover even if there was copyright infringement at hand you'd still have to prove you made the FAQ first, so it's pretty much impossible to do that for a website FAQ in the current laws.

In other words given both websites, and without knowing you I have NO means to know which came first and who copied who.

Secondly, there's the issue of 'so what'? It's FAQ not your thesis or anything particularly amazing. Just get over it, and sent a hate mail to the other studio, saying that you're on to them and they should be ashamed that they did this, and link them here (I can attack them quite nicely if they come over! ). But really, it's not worth the trouble I think.

Thirdly, General texts and ideas have this very simple problem: They can be copied WITHOUT actually being copied: An idea can come from several sources and it hardly means that one copied the other (even in industrial cases). This is why PATENTS exist, as opposed to copyright: You can't copyright an idea, but you can patent it so others WILL know about it but will NOT use it commercially. Just google 'apple vs samsung' and you can see how silly this can get.

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All the above said and done, I'd be quite annoyed as well. But since I'm a composer, and I sell my art, I'm much more sensitive about my works of art, rather than a simple FAQ! But I'm still very sensitive.

So go after them. Contact them via email, and then via the phone. Bug the *ahem* out of them. Tell them that they should find a way to use their own words for the same thing (because lets face it... most piano teachers do have students from the age of 4-5 or something, so over stretching this a bit, you end up writing 3.5...).

Usually, you have show a loss. Little videos seen by billions of viewers often results in the creator making a million plus dollars.

So pray every night before you go to sleep that his website is seen by billions of people because of coping from your website, because the moment you do a cut and paste in google, and do a search, it brings you to every website on the internet that has the same wording. Usually most people on the internet beg everyone on the internet just once to click on their website e so they can make billions, but sadly in their lifeitme, it usuualy doesn't happen.

I'm not sure how far you want to go with this, because it is just a FAQ, but you can always file a DMCA takedown. However, it's not good for your reputation and Google rep to have duplicate content.

Just a side note, when you "copy" something word for word, you always need permission from the original author, depending on their releasing license... it's only when you "quote" something, that's a small part, that it's okay without permission...

I wanted to let you know that I read your FAQ page and it appears that you've directly copied every text from mine.

I would appreciate that you either create your own FAQ, or otherwise credit me for the text.

Regards,

The owner of EZPiano"

But PLEASE, wait for someone else look it through... Plus if you've already sent it there's no reason to resend it now.

Morodiene, Ed I have to disagree with you. As someone who makes (almost) a living off the Internet, and with more than ten youtube videos, tons of mp3s, etc... I find it hard to just know for a fact that anything I do on the net will be copied directly. In fact it's only happened once.

I'm not sure if it's because my stuff are not interesting (it's probably that), or for any other reason, but Piracy is not about copying, but about other things.

There's an ongoing myth that "Everything in the Internet is practically Public Domain" which is as far away from the truth as possible! This is why I'm discussing this.

I also must (respectfully!) disagree with you. While I have no first-hand knowledge of how your business works (It's all Greek to me!); I have a pretty good idea that you make a living by[1] Composing[2] Teaching [3] Promoting your craft and skills[4] Marketing products from your craftsmanship

While the internet may be a convenient vehicle, or even forum, for your work; I'll bet it is YOU who does the work, not IT. Take this internet away, and you would readily find another way of accomplishing the same things.

If I am wrong, then tell me (it won't be the first time!)

Ed

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In music, everything one does correctly helps everything else.

By all means Ed and sorry for derailing the thread, but I think it's important.

You are perfectly right in every bit of your 4 points. And of course I am the one who does the work and not IT, it still remains that there is a notion going on that "anything we find on youtube, or the internet in a more general sense can be found for free...", which is wrong and hurtful.

An example:

The more views the Musica Ferrum youtube channel gets the better. It's obvious. And everything is there for free. Nobody has to pay to watch a youtube video. Yet, people decide to turn a youtube video into an mp3 (there are plenty of ways to do that), or even worst I've been notified that someone was screen capturing every bit of the video, to create a score out of it. While I think it's an extremely hard work and it puts a tiny bit of pride in me that someone is going through all this trouble to get a score by me, when it costs quite less than other European scores, it remains that what they're doing is disrespectful to my work, to the work of the publishers, etc.

Yet we have this contradiction: I'm the one who put the works on youtube for free, so it's a very small step to grab it with any means and have it offline as well, right? I want to be very close to the people I know and have more people to get to know me and the editions. I want to share the news, drafts, ideas, etc. Yet such situations as the above force me not to. I'd love to get PDF scores out but at the moment it simply is too risky to do so...

Morodiene, Ed I have to disagree with you. As someone who makes (almost) a living off the Internet, and with more than ten youtube videos, tons of mp3s, etc... I find it hard to just know for a fact that anything I do on the net will be copied directly. In fact it's only happened once.

I'm not sure if it's because my stuff are not interesting (it's probably that), or for any other reason, but Piracy is not about copying, but about other things.

There's an ongoing myth that "Everything in the Internet is practically Public Domain" which is as far away from the truth as possible! This is why I'm discussing this.

Oh, I never said that everything on the net becomes public domain - I don't agree with that, and of course it is wrong for that person to have copied ezpiano without permission. However, many times it's not worth getting upset over if they don't respond to a request to take it down or properly attribute the quote to you. I don't make a living off of the internet, but my husband does web development, so it's not that I don't respect someone's right to their own intellectual property. It's just a tough thing to really protect well.